Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [104]
What he was and was not is only of celebrity moment, unworthy next to his talent even in an age now of desperate and flimsy construction of heroes, the pallid figure made towering, assigned value in a valueless time. As a fighter, a champion—and there is no other measurement for those who ignore the buzz—he was the surface of a shield, unmalleable, made for mace and chain, flaring with light. He was the uncommon standard, the true measure that says the Parthenon should not be able to be scaled by those with just a shoeshine and a smile. Brilliance, greatness, of such impoverished meaning now, do not do the job when it comes to what he did with a pair of Everlast gloves. Funny, though, while watching film of most of his fights, trying to reassess the breadth and detail of his work, the mind strays from him, as though knowing that film cannot reclaim the once real. Attention goes to eerie, gray figures trying to survive and solve him, and it is like looking, from a high, high view, at the diorama of a lost world.
They were gone now, most of those who peopled the parabola of his ring life, and memory calls them up, just flickers of thought with no ordering of place or value. Sugar Ray Robinson: who imposed himself on a room like a rare artifact of pre-Columbian art, making his last stop in a dinky arena in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in a rattling station wagon alone with a suitcase showing the stickers from French liners he used to take. Sonny Liston: blasted even by the NAACP, setting off for the hills of Denver with a backpack of bricks and a jar of water, when he suddenly braked, snorting, the mucus streaming from his nostrils, at a shrine of Mother Cabrini. He soaked a rag and wiped her feet. “They look dirty to me,” he said. Floyd Patterson, whose favorite words were the self-portraying “vicissitude” and “enigma,” now hardly able to remember that he was once a fighter. Old and unordinary Cash, Ali’s father: dying at the most prosaic of stops of a heart attack—in a hardware store. One can still hear him jabbing at his son. “I eat pork. Nothin’ wrong with pork. Get these Muslim loafers outta here, I’ll cook you up a nice pork roast.”
And the others…so many of them: Oscar Bonavena: shot to death outside a Nevada whorehouse for trying to woo the owner’s wife and take the joint over. Jerry Quarry: the best white heavy since Marciano, constantly trumped by his betters in the division, not knowing how to find the bathroom in his brother’s small house, his food having to be cut in small pieces, then dying of erosive brain trauma. Cleveland Williams: having to run down his manager for his money on the street, then being handed a swindling $37.50 as his end, with his manager Hugh Benbow berating him. “I’m ashamed of you.” The Big Cat died in an accident coming home from a dialysis treatment. George Chuvalo: a good man with a bad roll, two sons lost to drugs and suicide and finally the suicide of his wife. Archie Moore: the mentally bejeweled fakir, above all, who knew the most and was listened to the least; he lived, like one of his oaks, to a graceful, long age. Bundini Brown, saying: “Next to the champ, I loved the sea best. It makes the world small. I was, you see, a pillar-to-post baby. You know, born on a doorstep with a note on my chest that says ‘Do the best you can for him.’”
I thought of my first conscious sighting of Ali. In Requiem for a Heavyweight, by Rod Serling, when the young Clay was the opponent of Mountain Rivera, and would send him into the arms of social workers and make him in the final pulling shot of the camera a wrestler in Indian headdress; Mountain’s fall from pride and dignity certainly so very far from any wild irony that could descend on the new royalty